Re: bloatware

On Sunday 30 March 2003 17:06, Michel Dänzer wrote:
|  On Son, 2003-03-30 at 08:45, Vadim Plessky wrote:
|  > On Sunday 30 March 2003 04:09, Havoc Pennington wrote:
|  > |  On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 11:49:13PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
|  > |  > Ok, what about 60MB of "font sources" (PCF, BDF fonts) in XFree86
|  > |  > CVS and resulting 20MB of "installable fonts" in RPMs?
|  > |  > Isn't it bloatware?
|  > |
|  > |  If you don't want to use those fonts, just delete them. This is not
|  > |  that hard. ;-)
|  >
|  > That's not so easy.
|  > Many apps use 'fixed' font name as default fontback.
|  > Those apps (incl. Window Managers) would just crash if that font is
|  > missing.
|
|  So it seems it's necessary and not bloatware?

*Right fix* should go to *right place*.
I have sent a patch to the author of sWM (Small Window Manager) somewhat year 
ago, and AFAIK he integrated it into current code.
(sWM was crashing without this font, or some other, installed)
FYI:  sWM is really minimalist WM, kickin ass of TWMs, FWVM, IceWM, etc.
It can be compiled in just 25KB binary :-)

I have tried to figure out which font is 'fixed' and in what directory it is 
located.  But than XF 4.1.0 came out and as font handling speeded up, I 
decided not to spend time on it anymore. Total performance of XFree86 became 
much better with XF 4.1.0 release, so you install legacy fonts and stil have 
reasonable performance.
Now I guess we just need to take PfaEdit (http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net), 
convert 'fixed', etc. to TTF with Embedded Bitmaps, and forget about BDF/PCF 
fonts in *core distribution*
On the other hand, Juliusz Chroboczek <[email protected]> sent updated info 
about bitmapped fonts support in XFree86 (to : [email protected], 
[email protected]  mailing lists)
I will forward that message to this list, as for some reason it has no 
responses on Devel list.

|
|  > Besides, deleting 60Mb of fonts from sources would reduce size of all
|  > Linux distributions - RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
|  > I am speaing about both RPMs and SRPMs combined.
|
|  What's stopping those distributors from dropping this stuff from their
|  binary and source packages if that's possible and useful? It sounds like

Limited human resources? Limited time frame?
Expectations that XFree86 team would fix this?

|  maybe your distribution doesn't package XFree86 in a way that allows you
|  to install only what you need, and you should complain to them?

Well, I complain to them when it's necessary. :-)
But *fundamental* things should be fixed in XFree86 , not at distribution 
level.
Note that I go further than just *installing binary packages from my favourite 
distribution*
I was building XFree86 on my own, too. And I can tell you that it's not a lot 
of fun.  Problems with fonts were visible without Looking Glass, that's why I 
propose now to fix those problems ASAP!..

-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons * BlueSphere Icons 0.3.0 released
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net